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Topic: WNY vs NYC (Read 7271 times)

It's my understanding that new york style is reffering to nyc style. I've discovered that the two regions have very different styles of pizza, in buffalo the pizza is more doughier, the sauce is sweeter and it usually has more cheese and is topped with margherita pepperoni (cup n crisp), it is very greasy, so that even the bottom of the crust is greasy. I'm trying to figure out how to use baker's percents so I can use the same recipe at work for myself at home and tweak it a little, but I cant give away the recipe cos my boss would kill me. But if anyone has recipes that are wny style, please share.

You should be in a pretty good position to reverse engineer the dough used at work so that you can play around with formulations at home. You can start with taking a dough ball for a corresponding size pizza and calculating the thickness factor. You already have shown that you know how to do that. Of course, you will need a scale to weigh the dough.

The next step would be to determine the remaining ingredients. I assume that you know what those ingredients are and quite possibly their quantities. Those quantities, especially if you start out with a known weight of flour, can be converted to baker's percents if they are not already in that form. If the dough at work is doughier than the typical NYC style, that suggests a thicker crust and possibly the use of a fair amount of sugar and oil, which will have the tendency to produce a soft and tender crust and crumb. If the dough is a cold fermented dough and the dough balls are kept in dough boxes and put into the cooler, the chances are pretty good that the amount of yeast is quite small. Otherwise the dough balls can expand too quickly and run into each other in the dough boxes and be harder to cool down. Since you are already familiar with the sauce, cheese and other toppings, you don't have to reinvent the wheel on those ingredients.

If there is any aspect you fell you need help with without revealing your boss' dough formulation, let me know.

Hi Rocky, I admire you're loyalty to the boss, you are truly a good employee. I will give you the basic formula for calculating Bakers Percent. (Bakers Percent Formula) First off remember Flour is always equal to 100% Baker's Percent & How it's Done Divide the weight of the ingredients by the weight of the flour and multiply by 100

This is the conversion formula , remember that the ingredient weight and the flour weight must be shown in the same weight units( ounces, grams, pounds). Now lets try a smaller recipe with a hypothetical formula 100%Flour,62%Water,1.5%Salt,2%Sugar,3%Oil, and 0.4%IDY. Using a calculator We will make a dough based on 2lb Of Flour converted to 32ouncesFlour 100% (you can decide you're own flour amount when needed). Water 62%: 32 x 62 press"%"= 19.84oz Salt 1.5%: 32 x 1.5 press"%"= 0.48oz Sugar 2%: 32 x 2 press"%"= 0.64oz Oil 3%: 32 x 3 press"%"= 0.96oz IDY 0.4%: 32 x 0.4 press"%"=0.128oz

After i started writing out this example i realize it may have been better to use grams in this instance. I hope you're scale can convert,i hope you have a scale for that matter. If you plan on using Bakers % at home you will need one. i hope this is clear enough and advise you to plug in a few numbers to get the hang of it. i also hope my math is correct. Chiguy

thanks for the help guys. I want to reverse engineer the other pizzeria's in the city. I mean blasdell pizza has the best crust, carbone's has the best sauce, and lovejoy's has the best cheese. Now if I could combine them all and make a super pizza, well then i would have something. I could easily figure out what i make at work, cos i make the pizza's there, but i want to get a recipe from some of the other places, but i though i would just start with ours and go from there, i can't share our recipes, so i was hoping to find someone elses or my own. You know because when you eat at your work all the time you want to try something different. The only place that has a website is carbone's http://www.carbonespizza.com/

You done good . I'm impressed. I am willing to bet that you are the only 19-year old in WNY, maybe even the nation, who can do what you did with the baker's percents .

If I had to guess, the dough conditioner is probably PZ-44, which is used to make high-gluten doughs less elastic and easier to form and shape. For a properly fermented dough, I don't see any need to use it. I couldn't even if I wanted to. It comes in a 50-lb. bag. To be a bit technical, to compensate for the dough conditioner, you could increase the amount of yeast and water so long as the baker's percent for the water remains about the same. The amounts are so small that I don't know that I would bother.

I don't work with fresh yeast like you do, so I have never tried to convert it to teaspoons or fractions thereof. Since it is a wet yeast, it's hard to convert to spoon size anyway. I estimate that the amount in your formulation is about 1/10 of one of those little cubes sold in the supermarket.

the oz's are dead on but the measuring spoons are estimated. It pretty much just comes down to punching numbers in a calculator. They say the yeast doesn't matter, but I think it does, but for small scale I don't think it does. The fresh yeast, is well fresh, and I know from brewing wine and beer that different yeasts will give different tastes. As well as rise times.

Im going to try both those recipes tommorow, and tell ya how it goes petezza. I bought some san marzanos, though they are grown in the USA (i was using cento crushed tomatoes which I thought are pretty good, but ill give these SM's a try), and got the KA flour and fleschmanns ADY. DAMNIT!!! I tried converting oz to tsp's and cups then I relized if I have 13.28oz of flour would equal 1 2/3 cups, but thats way too less, something must be wrong. Help petezza!!!!

The way I weigh out flour, the 13.28 oz. of flour comes to 3 cups and 2 tablespoons. To get close to the same volume of flour, you should first stir the flour in the flour bag to loosen it up a bit, then use an ordinary kitchen tablespoon to scoop flour from the bag into your one-cup measuring cup until it is slightly overflowing, and then level off the top of the measuring cup with the flat edge of a knife. Don't shake the measuring cup or bang it on a surface to cause the flour to settle. I also use level (not heaping) tablespoons for the 2 tablespoons of flour mentioned above. Following these steps should get you fairly close to 13.28 ounces. I used high-gluten flour to do the measuring. If you are using bread flour and aren't using a scale, it might vary slightly.

If you plan to use ADY instead of IDY, you will need to use more ADY on a volume basis (50 percent more, by volume) and proof it in a bit of the total water, at around 105-115 degrees F, for about 10 minutes, and then add it to the remaining water, which should be on the cool side.

The Pete-zza's Lehmann recipe that you posted is the one where he made a mistake and used too much yeast. I think he said it was 10x too much. I mistakenly just made a batch of that dough using that same amount of yeast, so hopefully it'll turn out all right. I wanted to make 3 pizza's so I tripled the recipe. In grams, it was 1003g of flour to 17g of yeast. Since there's so much yeast in it, I think I'll just cook the pizza's tonight instead of letting the dough sit in the fridge for a couple of days like I usually do.

Thanks for pointing that out. I missed it when I was responding to Rocky's last post. I had referred the readers of the original post to a later post for the proper amount of yeast, but apparently the note is sometimes missed or the note wasn't clear enough without reading subsequent posts. As it turned out, I liked the higher yeast version of the Lehmann dough a lot. I decided to go back to the original formulation and yeast amount since the assignment I accepted from Steve was to try out the basic Lehmann dough recipe, not to immediately change it. The formulation will work with greater amounts of yeast, but that wouldn't be the approach that a professional pizza operator would want to use because the dough would rise too fast and create dough management problems. In a home setting, it's not a real issue. However, one wouldn't want to go several days before using the dough.

A scale wouldn't be of much help to you with the small, lightweight ingredients like salt, yeast, oil, etc. The scale would help you most with weighing the flour and water. Here is what you are asking for:

You will note that I corrected the amount of yeast in the Lehmann recipe. Remember also that the Lehmann 16-inch recipe you chose uses a high hydration (around 65%), so unless you are using high-gluten flour you may have to adjust the water/flour ratio.

I made the pizza's today, and the wny style was very good, but the lehmann dough I thought tasted better and felt better chewing, altough it was a little too thin in the center and was WAY unmanagable, it was soft as hell, the doughball stretched way too easily. I used 65+% hydration on the lehmann. The wny version on the other hand could be slapped out into a skin perfectly. I used a 1/4 tsp ady in 110 water for both. I topped it with my sauce and sorrento low moist part skim and margherita pepperoni, and hot banana peppers, canned mushrooms and olives. I've found the secret to wny style dough is to use a criscoed aluminum pan instead of a screen.

Now you can see why I went to a lower hydration from the original 65%+ that I first tried with the Lehmann dough. But, that is OK. That is how you learn. Some NY style dough recipes call for around 70% hydration. If you really want to test the outer limits of a NY style dough, you should try that one some time .

With the ADY, it wouldn't be necessary for you to use all 110 degree water--only the small amount used for proofing purposes. The rest of the water is best kept cool for the Lehmann style dough.